The arrival of May signals the end of the school year and often prompts thinking about summer vacation. While there is much to celebrate about summer break, one concern is that the extended period without school can hurt some students by causing learning setbacks. Teachers can help to combat this potential learning loss by giving their students fun summer learning activities that will not interfere with other vacation plans.

Check out our summer listening list below for 2019 and give your students something cool to listen to while practicing their literacy skills and building background knowledge. We decided to pull together some of our most popular stories in a few fun categories. Check them out and see which of them will make it onto your summer listening list. You may have other favorite stories that you would like to add to your list based on what you know about your students or your own interests.

We have also included some articles and resources on summer learning loss at the end of this post. Check those out for some more information about what you can do to help students keep learning over the summer. Explore these great topics:

Interesting News

• Teen Diver Finds Rotting Golf Balls
• Captain Marvel: Marvel’s First Female Led Film
• The Toilet Cartel
• Flying Cars
• Running A Marathon Blind

Topics for Discussion

• Debate: Should Students Ask Alexa For Homework Help?
• Debate: Should Teachers Reward Students With Junk Food?
• Parents Hire Fortnite Coaches For Kids
• Teen Girls And Positive Social Media Messages
• Who Can Call Themselves Brown?

Thought-Provoking Stories

• The Story Behind Every Letter A To Z
• A Flowering Tribute To Emily Dickinson
• The Sears Catalog And Jim Crow
• Eddie Huang: Cultural Identity And Food
• Camus’ Complex Relationship With His Homeland

Stories to Explore for Back-to-School

Science

• Earth’s Greatest Threats
• Surprising Research On Parachutes
• Viruses Hiding In Airports
• Apollo 8 Mission
• Debate: Should Three-Parent Babies Be Allowed?
  

History

• Joan Of Arc’s Mom
• Lewis And Clark Bicentennial
• Eating Like An Early American
• 14th Amendment: Citizenship by Birth
• How the GDP is Like Your GPA

ELA

• Censoring Huck Finn
• Fighting Illiteracy With A Lesson Before Dying
• Shirley Jackson’s Life As An Author
• Young Adult Dystopia
• Actor Says Dyslexia Helped Shape Him

Resources for Fighting Summer Learning Loss

These articles are full of information about summer learning loss and strategies for preventing it, which can be shared with parents. It is worth noting that, “Income-based gaps in reading grow larger over the summer, with lower-income students showing drops and middle class students actually showing gains in test scores between spring and fall. This finding led to wide acceptance of the conclusion that summer time contributes directly to academic inequality” (Kuhfeld, 2018). Thus, providing engaging summer learning resources to support ongoing literacy skill development among low-income students can be especially helpful.

• Summer Learning Tips
• Summer Matters: How Parents Can Keep Their Children Learning All Summer Long
• Summer Learning Loss: What We Know and What We’re Learning
• Summer learning loss: What is it, and what can we do about it?
• Finding Out How to Stop Summer Learning Loss

If you have favorite stories you don’t see here, comment below or share with us on Twitter @listenwiselearn. Also if you have any audio stories or topics that you think are perfect for the classroom, please share them with us! We are always looking to diversify the topics on our platform.